But they're just screens. Brainwashing doesn't exist. I look forwards to the people of the future laughing at us in our contemporary forms of "Screen Addiction '25". I hope it has as nice of musical score as '72 does. I enjoyed it up to the smoking/cancer/surgery gore stuff started.
The average person now spends more than 4 hours per day looking at their phone, but only about 60% know that social media companies make their money via advertising. Around 48% know what a privacy policy is.
These massively uninformed, heavily manipulated citizens make up the majority of voters now and democracy may die because of it. Worse, anti-science madness in the form of anti-elitism and populist zero-sum economic lunacy have begun to prevail above reason.
Screens may still spell the end of personal liberty and an abrupt end to the forward march of human progress. It's just taken a bit longer than parents predicated when they tried to ban Beavis and Butthead.
On its face it would seem to be absurd without knowing the related history, the video appears to purposefully be meant to be absurd, and blunted in efficacy.
Starting with the documentation coming out in the 1950s with the return of PoWs from the Korean Conflict under Mao, who were quite irrevocably changed, brainwashing and thought reform have been a worrying subject for quite awhile; and rightfully so to the rational minded citizen that is the cornerstone of any strong/resilient nation.
The study of this area is about how you break people down mentally to build them back up again in a way your government wants in the process removing resistance or inducing blindness. The resistance is required of good citizenship to keep government functional. Many who know the truth of these things find it frightening that such a thing exists, but there are defenses against these dark arts (for the most part).
Intrinsic in this study are the very finite limits of free-will, and willpower under external structure and pressure based in mental compulsion and manipulation, and of the breaking of individual perception as a whole.
To be clear there is no doubt that brainwashing, thought reform, and cult programming; are all very real things that share quite a lot, and they are not as has been characterized in the media. They are quite different.
They exist, and the people who don't believe they exist are at the greatest risk because they are wholly without defense to the malign influence inherent in some of the related tools, techniques, and structures.
Special interests have been at this for quite a long time to associate absurdity with the these subjects to discredit the danger the science poses which is based in real science. You see this broadly when media portrays hypnosis as absurdity as well leaving false beliefs that induce blindness.
The same thing basically happened with oil companies discrediting scientists about climate change back when it would have cost a lot less to fix. PFAS too.
It is important to keep in mind that the history at the time of this video was the FCC/FTC was actively investigating this and would come to a ruling about subliminal messaging, stimuli, and other forms all based in these things which occurred in 1974. After that ruling, the special interests began a long campaign to defund and make impotent the FTC which can be seen as successful today (its toothless, and government based in our foundations is collapsing as a direct result).
Torture for the uninitiated is simply the structured imposition of psychological stress, which upon reaching certain levels of exposure reduce the ability of the recipient to form coherent rational thoughts, induces involuntary hypnosis where the person seeking relief from such stress may unconsciously adopt any perceived stance of the torturer including engaging in their own self-torture/destruction culminating in false confessions, and eventual psychological decoherence or break to non-responsive dissassociation, or a semi-lucid violent psychosis capable of planning which seeks annihilation on a target while also seeking self-annihilation. Everyone breaks, its just a matter of time and exposure.
Some have suggested that screens are harmless, and that is reductionist to the point of absurdity.
They are communications, and within the base thought processes involved in communications there are psychological blindspots which can be leveraged and degraded towards these horrible things. Propaganda is a real thing as are its effects.
Joost Meerloo and Robert Lifton cover the basis for these things in depth. There are also many modern programs that are demonstrably effective based on these lines of scientific progress if one knows where to look. (Cult deprogramming, Covert Hypnosis, Game Design/Social Media which is associated with modern forms of operant conditioning, narco-analysis, and similar structures to induce dopamine-triggered addiction; which makes one more susceptible to these things and may accompany regression towards infantile states).
The methods in this tape are purposefully made to seem absurd to those who do not understand how these things work in practice. In many cases, the structure and associated clustering is just as important as the elements for efficacy.
The authors seem to purposefully remove clustering aspects in this film which makes it seem absurd. Importantly also, there is this concept in hypnosis therapies as well as psychology as a whole of psychological reversal, which is an opposing force in response to recognized external mental compulsion. The harder you push someone the more they push back.
When you are manipulated by someone to your detriment and you recognize the means by which they do it, you get almost irrationally angry in response to that stimuli. This can happen when its sustained, but also quite suddenly when you catch on slightly after-the-fact. The latter is far more powerful. This here in the film is used to blunt the efficacy in the tape (by telling your conscious mind what is happening). Some people in hypnosis call the normal process of induction overcoming/bypassing the critical mind/attention/factor. The methods present do the opposite here seeking to engage it.
Subliminal aspects would be beneath the threshold of perception, if you recognize text that isn't below the threshold; and they are not doing real subliminals in the way you expect, in this film.
Destructive interference and mis-association occurs in the surgery pictures.
Most people believe they are special and hold that belief as a core self-concept; i.e. they are more than just bone, muscle, and sinew, and showing these images is meant to upset this belief and induce feelings associated with the backlash connected with the purpose of the film (subliminal messaging, and its efficacy), conflating people with false senses that these things aren't real.
There are things that people will not and cannot believe until they experience it firsthand (to their own detriment), when they cannot see how it works or recognize external facts. Torture, compulsion, and hypnotism are some of these things. You may not notice what is happening, but you notice something has happened, its often accompanied by confusion.
This is the same kind of experience one has when they went out to look at used cars only to look, and somehow find themselves back at home or after-the-fact where they now have a new car. They may have struggled to avoid that, but they lost that struggle because these types of influence can force your psychology to fight itself, and all the salesperson has to do is trigger and structure things a certain way and then just wait until you wear down.
https://progressiveawareness.org/research_desk_reference/leg...
Robert Cialdini, "Influence" is all about psychological blindspots used in clustering; excepting distorted reflected appraisal.
Robert Lifton, "Thought Reform, and the psychology of totalism"
Joost Meerloo, "Rape of the Mind", covers the Nazi's contributions to this as well though a bit dated.
Igor Ledochowski, has a number of programs that push the SOTA with regards to hypnosis. Torture is based in involuntarily induced hypnosis.
Neuro-linguistic programming originated in research to de-program victims of cults.
Ilyin, "On resistance to evil by Force", provides a useful older framework which after reading this other subject matter places appropriate context for the many aspects in which "Influence" based in such things should be considered, and provides some useful skills of discernment that apply as well. Overcoming a previously induced perceptual blindness is quite challenging.
thomassmith65•7mo ago